Davis: Don’t cry for MIB: It will make buckets of money

When is a $55-million opening weekend not considered a success? When it is the heavily hyped Men in Black 3 starring Will Smith.

There is already speculation that Fresh Prince’s three-year hiatus from movies may have knocked some of the fresh off his acting career. However, the opening is on par with Men in Black 2 and will likely end up making north of $200 million, plus, when you start adding the $130 million it has already grossed internationally it will potentially be very profitable.

And Smith’s career is far from over as next year he will star with son Jaden in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth and sequels to Hancock, Bad Boys and I, Robot every year after that.

The big question this coming weekend is whether Kristen Stewart will draw enough Twilight fans out to see another variation of the Snow White tale?

In Snow White and the Huntsman, Stewart plays the young princess with lips red as blood and hair black as night.

Charlize Theron plays her wicked stepmother, the ruthless Queen Ravenna who has conquered several European kingdoms and has her sights on England but sees that Snow is destined not only to surpass her as the fairest of them all but also as the ruler of her kingdom. The Queen learns from her magic mirror that the only way to remain on the throne is to consume Snow White’s heart and achieve immortality.

When Snow escapes into the forest, the Queen Ravenna sends Eric the Huntsman (Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) to kill her, however; he takes pity on the princess and teaches her the art of war. Now, with the aid of eight dwarves and her childhood love Prince William, she begins a revolution to kill her wicked witch of a stepmother once and for all.

After the success of TV’s Once Upon a Time and the moderate success of the more comedic Mirror Mirror, it will be interesting to see if audiences will come out for this darker vision of the classic Grimm fairy tale.

Opening at the Paramount Theatre is Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster, the true story of the Second World War veteran who became Canada’s most notorious bank robber.

Dismayed by public indifference towards veterans and humiliated by his inability to provide for his wife and children, Boyd turned to robbing banks and eventually became Toronto’s enemy number one.

Starring Scott Speedman and Brian Cox, it also features a cameo appearance by the late Lorne Greene in archival footage of him reporting on the Boyd Gang which was the very first telecast by the CBC.

Opening at the Grand 10 is The Hunter, in which Willem Dafoe stars as a mercenary who is sent to the Tasmanian wilderness on a dramatic hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger. Against his wishes, he must stay with the despondent wife and children of a missing zoologist and his connection to them forces him to confront the morality of what he his doing.